Music Review: Stars, "The Five Ghosts"

2 Stars
Pop

Like the unnerving white halls of a hospital, there is such a thing as too much sterility. Stars has doused The Five Ghosts with studio polish, and in the wake of a Pro Tools overdose, it’s hard to find a pulse.
One of the most glaring issues on the band’s most recent release is the vocals. From the start of “Dead Heart,” the first track on the album, Stars manipulates its male-female arrangements in eerie, unnatural ways, and it’s hard to distinguish the boundary between the singers’ voices and the thick coat of studio lacquer.

This in itself isn’t the album’s fatal flaw. Where artists like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon pair vocoders with lush, organic arrangements, Stars lacks this crucial sense of balance. Everything on the album seems to borrow from electro-pop trendsetters like LCD Soundsystem and fellow Canadian act Metric, and it’s hard to separate the group from its influences.

“Wasted Daylight” is a particularly egregious example. Vocalist Amy Millan sounds nearly identical to Metric’s Emily Haines, and lyrically, the song flounders in repetition and inanity. The track opens with Millan singing, “Heat is a heavy head / keeps me in my bed. / Push aside the pillow, / the whole room just turned yellow.” When the song reaches the chorus, her voice grows even more airy, inflated and supported by layers of studio adjustments and mid-tempo electronic beats.

In the midst of so many Pro Tools effects and borrowed sounds, the songs on The Five Ghosts are hard to distinguish from most other mid-tempo indie pop acts. It’s hard to find anything vital under all the studio sterility, and in the end, listeners want music with a little grit — even if that means getting their hands dirty.